Re: prerelease 4

[Lars Clausen <lrclause cs uiuc edu>]

On Sun, 2 Mar 2003, James K. Lowden wrote:
> On Sun, 02 Mar 2003 11:29:36 -0600, Lars Clausen <lrclause@cs.uiuc.edu>
> wrote:
>> On Sun, 2 Mar 2003, James K. Lowden wrote:
>> > 
>> > configure: error: Need FreeType library version 2.0.9 or higher
>> > 
>> > But I have 2.1.3, which might not be set up right, yet.  Does
>> > FreeType2 have to be on the client or the server?  I'm using a remote
>> > display.  
>> 
>> It needs to be on the server (i.e. the display).  X font serving is
>> broken by design from our point of view.
> 
> Er, OK, but I don't see how this test can work.  Is configure going to
> (supposed to?) follow $DISPLAY to find out what version of FreeType is
> installed ... on the machine I happen to be using for a display at that
> moment?  It's building a little test program on the X client (as it
> happens.  There's no guarantee that the build box is the target X client
> system, either.)  If Dia needs FreeType2 libraries to build -- as I'm
> sure she does -- OK, but the X client won't necessarily have a font
> server installed or anything in the font path.  (I'm no expert.  A lot of
> what I know about X fonts I learned reading this list.)

The X client (server, actually -- it 'serves' the display to the 'client'
program.  Quite confusing.) doesn't need a font server.  We don't use the X
font system at all, only font-config.  Since X font servers cannot give us
the outlines of the fonts nor the font data itself, we cannot use that for
rendering PostScript.  So to ensure fonts being the same across the board,
we just ask FT2 for fonts, and it finds them via font-config.

I know this is going to be a problem for systems that don't have fonts on
the client computers, but it's not like it's hard to install fonts (once
you don't have to install X server as well).  I've been considering
packaging a minimum set of fonts with Dia, but that's really a packager
issue. 

> Is there another variable I need to set to tell configure or Dia where to
> look for fonts?  Or is the test really bogus and I should skip over it? 
> FreeType2 2.1.3 installed on both the client and the server, and fc-list
> returns fine things on the X server box:  

font-config (/etc/fonts/fonts.conf) is what you want to look for.  I'm not
sure what it'd look like for an X client, but if you can just have it point
at some dirs with fonts, you should be ok.  See fontconfig(3), which has a
section with a User configuration file example.

-Lars

-- 
Lars Clausen (http://shasta.cs.uiuc.edu/~lrclause)| HĂ„rdgrim of Numenor
"I do not agree with a word that you say, but I   |----------------------------
will defend to the death your right to say it."   | Where are we going, and
    --Evelyn Beatrice Hall paraphrasing Voltaire  | what's with the handbasket?